Radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh is suggesting liberal backers of abortion are harming their own causes with their support of the right to terminate unborn children.

border=0 width=170 height=200>Rush Limbaugh

The conservative icon tied remarks on the 30th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion into news about U.S. population trends – specifically, how Census officials now say Hispanics have become the top minority group in America.

Limbaugh wondered aloud how many blacks and women, for instance, would be alive today had it not been for the millions of abortions that have taken place since state restrictions were done away with three decades ago:

40 million people who would have been born haven’t been born since 1973. … It’s about 1.2 million a year that are aborted, and statistically half of those would have been women. Look at how many contributors to Social Security have not been born. Look at how many taxpayers who could have contributed to a prescription-drug program have not been born.

If we had these 40 million Americans, let’s figure half of them would’ve found a job by now. … We’re talking 20 million minimum, and look at the kids they would have had … Look at the family tree from those 40 million, look at how many more taxpayers! We might not have a deficit, we might have a prescription-drug program, we might have Medicare fixed.

Look at the damage these abortions have caused in addition to snuffing out these individual lives – half of which were women. And how many were minority? Would this statistic today – Hispanics being the No. 1 minority – be true today were it not for all these 40 million abortions? There’s a price to pay for the decisions you make.

An entire generation of women has grown up in the 30 years since Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion. In focus groups conducted by the abortion rights group NARAL Pro Choice America, most women under age 35 did not understand the meaning of a coat hanger as a symbol of unsafe abortions. This is good news: Most young people cannot recall the days when desperate women were butchered or killed by crude abortion attempts. But such innocence is also a weapon for those who would implacably chip away at those rights.

Limbaugh says the editorial shows the current pro-choice movement thinks it’s failing because women “don’t get it” when a coat hanger is brought up.

“Is this not sick,” asked Limbaugh, “to judge the health of a movement on the basis of that? Does that not tell you what this has always been founded on? … Here’s a movement that is proud of the coat-hanger past and is upset that not enough women under 35 understand what it is.”

He wondered if abortion-rights activists would now conduct seminars and produce videos to raise awareness and sensitivity regarding those who have had abortions with coat hangers.

Limbaugh also discussed a hypothetical scenario involving homosexuals, and how they would suddenly reverse their pro-choice stance should scientists prove a “gay” gene exists:

Imagine we identify the gene – assuming that there is one, this is hypothetical – that will tell us prior to birth that a baby is going to be gay. Just like a baby is gonna be redheaded and freckled and maybe tend to be overweight and so we tell the parents that, and the parents say “Nope, don’t wanna give birth to that child, [it's] not gonna have a fair chance. Who wants to give birth to an overweight, freckle-faced redhead?” Bam. So we abort the kid.

Well, you add to this, let’s say we discover the gene that says the kid’s gonna be gay. How many parents, if they knew before the kid was gonna be born, [that he] was gonna be gay, they would take the pregnancy to term? Well, you don’t know but let’s say half of them said, “Oh, no, I don’t wanna do that to a kid.” [Then the] gay community finds out about this. The gay community would do the fastest 180 and become pro-life faster than anybody you’ve ever seen. … They’d be so against abortion if it was discovered that you could abort what you knew were gonna be gay babies.

Just how the abortion issue would play in the 2004 election was also a matter of discussion on the air.

Among the White House hopefuls is Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., who attacked Republicans in the executive and legislative branches looking to restrict access to abortion.

“These people believe that politicians and judges in their wisdom are in a better place to make the decision that can so profoundly affect a woman’s life,” said Edwards. “They are wrong, they are wrong, they are wrong, and we must stop them, and we will stop them.”

Limbaugh responded by saying the reality is the exact opposite of Edwards’ contention.

“It’s been the position of the liberals all along that it is precisely politicians and judges who should aid in these decisions,” Limbaugh said.

“They do think they are in a better position to tell you how you can spend your money or who’s in better charge of your money – you or them – in government. They do believe that judges and politicians – because they’re elitists – have far more common sense when it comes to your life than you do.”

The talk host, heard on some 600 stations nationwide, said the whole debate has never even been a crucial factor in the outcome of elections.

“Pro-abortion has never been the slam-dunk political issue everybody thinks it is. It’s always been a 50-50 issue. When you get into the internals of all of these polls, when you get down to questions such as ‘Should abortion be used as a form of birth control?’ it’s not even 50-50. It’s way way way ‘no’ to that.”

Regarding the pro-choice mantra that laws shouldn’t tell women what do with their own bodies, Limbaugh said such restrictions are nothing new.

“We have laws in this country that deny women doing all kinds of things with their body. They can’t be prostitutes legally, can’t do drugs legally. We tell not just women but all kinds of people what they can and can’t do with their bodies.”

Looking toward the future, Limbaugh expressed optimism that Americans, perhaps many yet to be born, would reject the pro-choice rhetoric, saying it evinces a cavalier attitude toward life itself.

“Every generation has thought from the beginning of time … it’s living in the ‘last days,’ … yet it’s never doomed and it’s never finished, and it’s never over with, and why is that? Well, because there’s always a new generation or two that have yet to be born that don’t know any of this negative stuff. And they eventually do get born despite the pro-abortion crowd, and they grow up and they decide they want a certain life for themselves that may not include some of all this rotgut that current generations are facing.”